Licensing

OpenBIOS Licensing

OpenBIOS is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2. If you adapt OpenBIOS to your needs, please contact us with your changes so that you can contribute your changes back to the community.

Why GPL?

We see the GPL giving OpenBIOS a big competitive advantage over other firmware solutions:

As a hardware vendor you get the warranty that nobody hiddenly improves the code you have been contributing without giving those improvements back. Thus, GPL guarantees that you keep control over your work and contributions.

End users / customers get great benefit from OpenBIOS being GPL licensed: The GPL insures customers that a given platform will act like all other OpenBIOS platforms. BSD is a negative marketing point where BIOS is concerned.